Song and Sport, Writing and Mime

GAMBIER, Ohio (June 2, 2004) Summer's here--time for sandals, swimming, picnics, endless twilight, and fireflies. But Kenyon doesn't snooze through the summer; it simply exchanges one kind of animation for another.

From June until early August, the campus welcomes an array of summer programs and camps, some sponsored by the College, some independent. Athletes, mimes, musicians, teachers, and writers all discover the charms of Kenyon and Gambier. In all, close to 4,000 visitors will spend time at the College.

High-school students come to campus for the Young Writers at Kenyon program, sponsored by the Kenyon Review. (The Review also hosts a writing workshop for adults.) Other high-school students focus on science, through a program sponsored jointly by Kenyon and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Sports-related camps for young people include programs in basketball, cheerleading, football, lacrosse, martial arts, and swimming.

Kenyon rites of summer embrace both song and silence. Mid-June brings an annual gathering of barbershop quartets. Some 350 barbershoppers will be harmonizing here, their stay culminating in a public concert featuring more than 80 quartets as well as a chorus or two. Later, the School for Mime Theater arrives. The mimes always offer several public performances, and nobody who's in town for the summer misses their comic, quirky, colorful appearance in the Gambier Fourth of July parade.

An oral-history institute, service organizations, church groups, teen groups, Red Cross volunteers, and teachers all will maintain the comfortable traffic on Middle Path. Then comes a lull. Then the students return, and the pace quickens yet again.

One of the nation's leading liberal arts and sciences colleges and home to the Kenyon Review, Kenyon College offers 1,594 students a challenging educational experience enriched by a culture of friendship. Graduates of the College have included actor and philanthropist Paul Newman and author E. L. Doctorow.